The freelance client onboarding checklist

Most project problems are onboarding problems that took six weeks to become visible. Access that was never granted, a decision maker who was never identified, an assumption nobody wrote down. A consistent onboarding sequence takes about an hour and prevents most of it.

Before work starts

• Signed agreement. Scope, exclusions, revisions, payment schedule, ownership on final payment.
• Deposit cleared. Not sent, cleared. Work starts when money arrives.
• A client record created. Company, contacts, currency, billing email, payment terms, timezone. If it lives only in your inbox, you will lose it.
• A project created with a budget. Fee, estimated hours, deadline. Even on fixed fee work, an hour budget is what tells you later whether you priced it correctly.

The kickoff, in one meeting

Half an hour, with an agenda you send in advance:

• Who decides. Name the single person whose approval ends a revision round. Projects with three equal approvers take twice as long.
• What done looks like. Get them to describe the finished state out loud. Write it down and send it back the same day.
• What you need and when. Content, logins, brand assets, existing data. Put dates on each and say what slips if they are late.
• How you will communicate. One channel for decisions, cadence for updates, response time expectations both ways.
• The known risks. Say the two things most likely to delay the project now, while it is neutral information rather than an excuse.

The access list

Collect everything in one pass rather than asking for a new credential every three days:

• Hosting, CMS, repository, or design file access
• Analytics and any reporting tools you need
• Brand assets, fonts, and licence details for anything proprietary
• Existing documentation, even if it is out of date
• Billing contact and any purchase order or supplier onboarding process

That last one matters more than it looks. Large clients often require supplier registration before they can pay a single invoice, and discovering that at invoice time adds a month.

The recap email

Send one email within 24 hours of kickoff containing scope in one paragraph, deliverables as a list, dates including their dependencies, the fee and payment schedule, and the named decision maker. Ask them to reply confirming.

That reply is the most useful artifact in the project. It is a written record of a shared understanding, created before anyone has a reason to remember things differently.

Set up the admin once

• Create the client and project records so time, expenses, and invoices all land against the same thing.
• Set the currency at the client level so every invoice inherits it.
• Add the recurring template if it is a retainer.
• Note the payment terms and any late fee policy so invoices generate correctly without you thinking about it.

Doing this at onboarding rather than at invoice time is what makes a project report possible later. In Clienty the client record is what pulls together invoices, hours, and expenses across the suite, so the setup pays off every time you look at profitability.

TL;DR

• Nothing starts before a signed agreement and a cleared deposit.
• Kickoff covers who decides, what done looks like, what you need by when, and the two biggest risks.
• Collect every credential in one pass, including the supplier registration process for large clients.
• Send a recap within 24 hours and get a written confirmation.